Proclaim by Word and Example

This sermon was preached on Saturday and Sunday, June 23-24 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Mount Lebanon, PA. The readings for this sermon were:  1 Samuel 17:  32-49 ,  Psalm 9:9-20 , and  Mark 4:35-41 .  “So that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not save by sword and spear.” When David the young shepherd boy goes to face Goliath the mighty warrior, he comes armed with the only secret weapon he needs. David’s special power is his trust in God—a trust grounded in his own terrifying experiences with lions and bears. David knows by heart the promise woven through the entire story of God’s people: God can be trusted to be there for us, the way God was there for us before. For David, going with God means a staff, a shepherd’s pouch, five smooth stones from the riverbank, and his sling. He already has what he needs. Now for Saul, though, going with God meant strapping on his bronze helmet and heavy chain ma

This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 17 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, PA. The texts for this sermon were  1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 ,  Psalm 20 ,  2 Corinthians 5:6-10,14-17 , and  Mark 4:26-34 . Nine years ago today, a seventeen-year-old girl in the church I grew up in died by suicide. The tiny, poignant moments after Emma’s death forever redefined the meaning of church for me forever. They left behind slivers of memories that will stay with me the rest of my life. The roughness of the dilapidated couch I curled up in as teenagers from school filtered into our youth group barn. The way the pew shook as my mother sobbed beside me at Emma’s packed and overflowing funeral. The sound of my ministers’ voices as he transformed his grief into poetry and as she spoke of her vision of Emma enveloped in a great big bear hug from her late church mentor at the gates of heaven--when I glimpsed for the first time what looks like for clergy to grieve and hold everyone else’s gri

This sermon was preached on Wednesday, June 6 for the Feast Day of Ini Kopuria. The readings for this sermon were: Zechariah 1:7–11 , Revelation 14:13–16 , Matthew 8:5–13 , and Psalm 31:19–24 . The story of Ini Kopuria is a story of return. Ini was born at the start of the last century in Guadalcanal, one of the islands in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. Ini left there as a young man to attend the Anglican St. Barnabas School on Norfolk Island. There, missionaries trained young men in the religious life with the expectation that they would return to their people to teach about the Christian faith. But Ini defied expectations, returning to his home island as a police officer, not a missionary. Soon after, however, Ini came to realize that God was calling him to return to the religious life. He founded his own Anglican religious order, the Melanesian Brotherhood, which still exists today, serving the South Pacific region of Melanesia. In 1927, three years after taking his vows